Thirty-eight special in hand, where are the bullets? Damnit, where did you hide the bullets? I can't do it anymore; I can't be perfect for you anymore. For sixteen years I've done and been everything you asked, I am what you thought I should be, but when were you going to let me be me? As I began to search the vastness of the world unseen until now it is overwhelming. Why did you shelter me so? I have been so ill prepared to handle the freedom and it's all your fault, why did you have to be so perfect and make me try and live up to your standards? There is so much I have missed out on, have not had the joy or ability to experience, and now you taunt me with it. I get a taste and you try and hide it, try and scare me with it. Why can't I make my own decisions for once; don't you understand that you are hurting me so much more by restraining me. Go away, leave me alone, let me go, I want to do it by myself Help me, please! .
The pressures placed on the youth of society today are unique to this generation, for with every passing year the bar is raised and the best keep having to get better. Some people strive on the competition and rise to the top, future leaders of the nation, and the rest fit in somewhere else on the success scale, but does that mean they are not as "good" as those on top? This is the biggest challenge I have been faced with in trying to mature into a young adult, trying to figure where I fit. For the first sixteen years of my life I had this perception of what success was as taught to me by my parents, more specifically my father: be the best and do the best by working harder than others. I accepted it and lived according to it because with no alternative for comparison this is the only option I had. I was happy, too, until I was introduced to alternatives. Conflict arose between my heart and my mind because while I told myself I had to keep being the best, had to set aside pleasure in order to maintain perfection, my heart told me that I wanted to be happy; that I needed to find my own definition of success because perfection was not it.
